


Parks and Wreck

by SomewhereApart



Series: OQ Fix-It Week 2017 [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, OQ Fix-It Week, first curse au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-23 04:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12498324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomewhereApart/pseuds/SomewhereApart
Summary: A little First Curse AU, wherein Robin and Roland come over in Regina's original curse, and we see what happens between them once she realizes who he is.





	Parks and Wreck

**Author's Note:**

> My Wild Card entry for Fix-It Week, Day 3.

She's known him – known  _of_  him anyway, since the beginning.

He's head of the Parks department, and she's the Mayor, she could never have  _not_  known him; he works for her.

And yes, of course, she had noticed early on the dimples, and the scruffy bearded jawline, and that ridiculously attractive lumberjack look of a man who spends all his days dealing with the ins and outs of the Storybrooke wilderness.

But there'd always been one problem, and that's that he's insufferable.

A smirky, snarky, entirely-unintimidated-by-her, arrogant… ass.

And then there was the matter of that tattoo.

She'd seen it the first summer here, the first warm day, had zoomed in on it with an almost comical, movie-esque precision as he'd held his son's hand on Main Street, a drippy chocolate ice cream cone in the other.

Her heart had thudded so hard she'd thought Ruby would hear it from four feet away, but the waitress had only sidled up to where Regina was standing gobsmacked in the entrance to Granny's outdoor seating, and followed her stunned gaze.

"I know, right?" the younger girl had sighed. "I wanna climb that man like a tree."

The possessive anger that had had Regina imagining the satisfying crunch of Ruby's neck as it wrenched too far around with a well-placed flick of the wrist had been… surprising. She'd had just one thought –  _Mine._ Okay, maybe one more:  _Back off, bitch_.

And then she'd had to remind herself – she didn't choose him, she chose  _this_. Her curse. She'd walked away in favor of vengeance and her own happy ending (so then shouldn't she have this now – him – her soulmate? Is that why he's here?), and it's not as though channeling Ruby's more… animal instincts into lust rather than murder hadn't been built into said curse, so she couldn't hold that against her, she'd supposed.

Still, she'd glared, murmured, "Private thoughts, public place," to the girl a mere thirty seconds before the head of her Parks department had passed with his boy. He'd smiled at her, nodded his head, had  _Madam Mayor_ ed as usual, except this time it had made butterflies erupt in her stomach. Her smile in return had been practiced and stiff, her limbs melting.

It was stupid – she'd known him for months.

He was an ass. An arrogant, smirky, irritating… ass. (He had a great ass…)

She doesn't  _like_  him. This isn't… this isn't what a soulmate should feel like. (He gets under her skin, always; she looks forward to seeing him as much as she dreads it, but well, Graham isn't the only eye candy in town and sometimes she likes a guilt-free fantasy to occupy her lonelier nights – she can kiss that goodbye now that she knows who he really is, she supposes.)

So no, no, she doesn't think this is… Well, it's just not the right time. She has her town, she has her job, she has the beginnings of calm, the dregs of night terrors, the vault of potions, the hollow echo of magic in her bones, in the streets. She has anger, still, and pain, and not much else. She'd be no good for him like this, she needs more time.

And besides, she doesn't  _like_  him anyway.

**.::.**

Months pass, and she likes him even less.

He makes her blood boil, makes her seethe, makes her pulse pound.

She gasps his name in bed with Graham once, and they don't speak for nearly a week – a week in which the head of her Parks department calls with numerous complaints about needless interference from the sheriff's department. About a parking ticket he was absolutely not owed, and a citation for improper lawn maintenance on his "bloody cabin in the woods, it's not as though I need to match the neighbors, Madam Mayor. The squirrels haven't made any sodding complaints."

She tells Graham to grow up and get over it, reminds him that  _he_  is the one balls-deep inside her on Friday night, not some irritating forest-dweller who just happened to get under her skin that  _one day_. The make-up sex is bruising, has her wincing over her tender places in the morning, finger-bruises on her hips.

When she sees Locksley again everything clenches pleasantly, and she burns, she seethes, her blood boils, her heart knocks.

She hates him.

(She wants him.)

(It's still not the right time.)

**.::.**

The more he talks, the less attractive she finds him. A year passes, and then three, and then five.

He challenges her. Submits ridiculous budget proposals for his department, argues against her new construction project. The population never changes, time is frozen here, but she sees things on the news, hears of things, wants to add a community pool for those long winter months, a rec center – she's a good leader, damnit, even if they couldn't see it past that insufferable Snow White's simpering, and so her people will live the rest of their pointless lives in a certain amount of comfort. They will despise and be grateful for her in turns, because she is  _a good mayor_ , she was raised for this, she knows how to do this.

It occurs to her one day that she has doomed him to misery, too.

He's here, he's cursed. Which means that he's not going to get his happy ending. It's built into the curse.

He will never find his true love, will never…

But she's right here.

Maybe that's why he's such an insufferable  _ass_.

Maybe in their land he was different.

Maybe he's another thing she ruined with her poison touch. Another unwitting casualty to Snow White's toxic existence. That little brat had cost her Daniel, and now she's cost her this man, too.

Regina raises Mary Margaret Blanchard's rent, just because she can. She shoots down a measure to increase pay for Storybrooke's educators.

It's better she stays away. He's not meant for happiness here, and she wasn't meant for it, ever.

She stays with Graham, bares her teeth at her head of Parks at every Town Hall, every city council meeting, every one-on-one conference they have about Sherwood Park (Robin Hood, she's realized by now – of all the men she could have been destined for, she got the Prince of Thieves. Mother would be so proud…).

Life goes on.

**.::.**

She hates him, but she knows him, too.

Knows parts of him he does not speak of. Quiet parts.

His wife is dead. Her plot is three rows from the Mills family mausoleum. He brings her flowers every Wednesday, and always has.

She sees him, most weeks.

Not quite in the distance, too close for comfort, bringing wildflowers in the summer, bright daisies in the winter.

Regina carries stark white lilies, or blood red roses. Sits in the comforting dark and stares at her father's sarcophagus, ruminates on the cost of all she's built.

"I'm sorry, Daddy," she murmurs most weeks. Sometimes, "I'm so relieved, Daddy. Nobody bothers me here. But I miss you. I'm sorry."

The light of a summer afternoon seems too bright; she squints as she emerges from her secrets into the open air.

It's better in the winter. The sun sets sooner, and it is colder. Less jarring.

They don't cross paths as much, then. He brings his boy before dinner instead of after.

He walks toward her as she trudges through a fresh layer of Maine snowfall, his son on his hip. He nods as he passes her, and she nods back.  _Regina_ , he says here, because there are no titles in the realm of the dead, she supposes.

She answers,  _Rob_ , and wonders how his name is so close in this world to what it had been in the other. Everyone else has been made new, everyone but her. And he is Robert, not Robin, but nobody ever calls him that. He's always just Rob.

She wonders if it was so she'd know him for who he was, but that's silly. What would be the point? Why would he even matter here?

She is three rows away from her family mausoleum when the lights from his truck shift and curve, and he's gone.

She turns left instead of right, steps into his much-bigger bootprints and follows them to the simple grave. It's heart-shaped – two hearts, in fact. A double plot. One side etched, the other empty. Waiting. He'd loved someone else so completely they'd arranged to spend eternity together in the dirt (she'd been dead before the curse but he's still devoted; sometimes Regina thinks this curse is out to get her, out to cut needlessly at her soft parts – she blames Rumplestiltskin).

He'd left the daisies. Pink ones, today. And a child's drawing. Daddy in his red checkered plaid, Landon with his dark mop of curls. And Mama. Her heart aches ( _Owen_ , she thinks, and then she pushes that thought down hard, far away, into the depths with all her other sins).

_Clare Locksley_

_Beloved Mother_

_Gone Too Soon_

Regina wonders what her name was before. In the Forest.

**.::.**

More time goes by, and nothing changes.

Landon Locksley is perpetually four.

He smiles at her while everyone else cowers.

He sits in her seat at the diner sometimes, and she does not kill his father for the slight. She just… sits elsewhere. Puts an empty stool between them and eats apple cinnamon pancakes, and eavesdrops as he tells his father about all the things Sister Astrid promised they'd do in preschool today.

Rob takes his coffee black, and strong.

He teases her for her two lumps of sugar and generous pour of cream.

She rolls her eyes. Sometimes she smiles.

Mostly she feels hollow.

He leaves with his son, small hand clutched in large, wedding ring on a chain around his neck (she has a chain much the same,  _Daniel Daniel Daniel…_ ), somehow able to breathe and live on, to not raze entire lands in his grief and pain.

He smiles, and it does not look like it hurts.

Regina feels a hollow place in her middle, a burned-out useless place.

It's her fault, of course—she'd swallowed the bitter poison, she'd carved herself out to make herself safe—but she looks at Rob and Landon Locksley, and she wonders if tiny hands and adorable dimples are what keep him from wanting to strangle the people who cut him off in traffic.

**.::.**

Eighteen years into the curse, he is still a thorn in her side but she's grown used to the ache.

He challenges her.

She doesn't like him.

He argues with her in front of the whole damn town.

She doesn't like him.

She's used to him.

She doesn't like him.

He makes life more interesting.

She is hollow.

He has a wonderful son.

She wants to fill the emptiness inside her, but it is fathomless.

The solitude she had once treasured, the big house all to herself, the empty rooms devoid of servants, the nobody to touch her unless she asks for Graham, no groping hands, no tightening of corsets, no pinching, scrubbing, demanding, adjusting.

It's lonely now.

Eighteen years, and she has remembered that she can feel something other than rage. Something other than pain.

She can feel nothing.

A dull, empty void.

She puts fresh flowers in all the vases every week; nobody smells them but her.

She fills out paperwork, but why?

If she stopped, what would happen? Does the curse run this town, or does she? If she left, would anyone even notice?

Depression, she knows. This is depression.

Her whole life has been depression. Bleakness. Blackness.

Her heart hurts, it aches, but at least that means it still works.

She is not happy in this land. It's a sobering realization; what did her father die for if not for her happiness?

(Nobody touches her without her consent; her name is hushed out of trepidation but not terror; she's a hardass, but she's not evil; she can breathe; nobody remembers her crimes; Daddy didn't die in vain.)

Daniel's birthday comes, and she cannot breathe under the weight of grief. She stays in bed all day, eyes glassy and wet, weeps and sleeps fitfully in turns.

This place is empty; she is empty; there is a hole in her heart, just like He promised there would be.

Has she even won anything? This whole town, and what's it worth?

She calls the Cricket, and he asks if she's ever known happiness.

She thinks of Landon, of sticky fingers and dark curls, and  _Today Sister Astrid taught us about Africa!_ , and she says, "Owen."

**.::.**

She wants a child, wants something to fill her empty parts, and so she adopts one.

A sweet boy, beautiful, magnificent.

He screams.

He screams, screams, and her heart is full, so full of love, that empty place covered over, she doesn't have time for her own pain, only for his, and something is  _wrong,_  but what?

He stops crying for  _her_ , for Snow White. For Snow Fucking White.

That hole rips open again, her insides draining down and out like sand through an hourglass, collecting in her shoes.

 _She_  is what's wrong.

Children can sense things, she'd been told once, decades ago, and she'd laughed because if that were true that precious princess would have known how much Regina  _hated_  her, and she never had, not until it was too late.

But this baby knows, her Henry, he  _knows_  she is rotten.

Her heart is pounding, her ears ringing, her stomach burning like she's swallowed acid, and when she emerges from the hospital there they are, in the spot next to her Mercedes.

Of course.

Her hands are shaking as she clicks the car seat into place, and why aren't they all buckled in yet? The two of them?

Landon is waiting, brandishing a neon green band-aid on his shoulder.

"I got a shot, Manam Mayor."

"Madam," she corrects crossly, too frazzled for a preschooler's priorities right now, not when she is once again not enough, never enough, she wants to sink into the earth, wants to dig herself down into an empty plot, cool earth between her fingers, under her nails, in her lungs, wants to be done with it all, because she cannot even have the balm of a son to love to soothe her hurt. She cannot, because she hurts  _him_ , and he's just a baby, he doesn't deserve—

The hand that settles on her wrist is warm and strong.

"It's hard when they're ill," Rob tells her sympathetically, and she glances down at his son, dark eyes round and hurt, and God, she's wretched, she's hurt the feelings of this sweet boy, too.

"He's not," she tells his father helplessly. "He's just… inconsolable."

She doesn't like this man, but he's supposed to be for her, and she is drowning, swallowing dirt, suffocating under her own awfulness, so she admits, "I think it's me."

One side of his mouth turns up, not quite his usual smirk but something soft and warm.

"Landon screamed for the first four months," he says with the easy knowledge of a man who's done all of this before. "Clare thought it was her, too."

 _Clare wasn't an Evil Witch_ , Regina counters silently.  _She wasn't even Clare_.

She doesn't answer him; can't. He doesn't know how terrible she is. He shouldn't even touch her; she'll poison him just by breathing his air.

"It was only a bit of colic." His hand is still warm on her wrist. "Just give him all the love you can, and see him through it." He makes it all sound so fucking simple. But she hasn't loved in decades; what if she doesn't know how? (She must, it wouldn't hurt this much if she didn't love this child; he filled her whole heart, he is perfection, she would do anything to ease his suffering.) "And if you find yourself in need of extra sleep, I'm very good with children. An exhausted parent helps no one."

Her brows rise, the self-loathing and panic ebbing away for a moment. "You're offering to babysit? Why?"

"Because you're a single mum, and a hardworking one at that. And because I'm rather fond of you, Madam Mayor."

Her brow wrinkles.

"You hate me."

"No, milady, you mistake me –– you hate  _me_. I find you exhilarating." His gaze flicks down and back up; she hasn't slept, she has no idea what she's wearing, she's sure she looks… terrible. "And stunning."

Butterflies war with the acid in her belly.

Maybe she likes him  _a little_   _bit_.

**.::.**

Her son is the child of the Savior.

It's a cruel trick, a vicious curse; she rips Rumple a new one and he plays innocent. Is he innocent? He'd procured the child, he must have known, he  _had_  to have. But he doesn't, he can't, not in this land. The curse.

Cruel fate, then.

It's not the fairies that control everything, it's fate. Like the Greeks. Fortuna. Or was she Roman?

Regardless, there's some vengeful deity out there who has doomed Regina to suffering, has handed her a child and all the love in the world, and then told her she cannot have him without risking everything she's built.

So back to Boston they go.

She's saying her goodbyes when she realizes that she loves him more than vengeance. That she would rather have this boy (tiny fingers that will be sticky and soft, someday she will teach him to make apple pancakes) than any square inch of Storybrooke, Maine.

She keeps him. He's  _hers_.

She nearly misses a turn on the drive back that night, and her heart drums hard, hard, hard, the last twenty miles into town.

_An exhausted parent helps no one._

It's after nine when she calls Rob Locksley, but he comes anyway. Landon is asleep in his arms, and he settles him on the sofa in the sitting room, then takes the wriggly bundle from her own arms, and urges, "Sleep, Regina. I can handle a night of bottles and nappies. I don't want to see you until morning."

She narrows her eyes and reminds him she's his boss.

"Office hours are over, Madam Mayor," he says, and, "I got my son out of bed to watch yours. Go to bed."

She does.

Leaves her son in the hands of her head of Parks, and chugs some NyQuil for good measure.

She slips into sleep with the groggy realization that she trusts him.

**.::.**

Graham is not good with babies. He's alright with kids, but babies vex him, and so as she digs deep into motherhood, pours all her love and time and effort into Henry, he grows more and more distant.

Things end; she cannot say when.

Just that one day she realizes her weekly dalliances with the Huntsman-turned-Sheriff have been replaced by weekly playdates in her office. Landon loves Henry. Dotes on him, tells him about noble thieves and scheming pirates.

He's too young to understand, but her sweet boy giggles and kicks his legs, blows spit bubbles.

He is  _perfection_.

Rob is a good father. Affectionate. Warm. Firm, but not unkind. Never unkind.

One day, they are in the park, Henry pulling up blades of grass that she perpetually has to fish from his mouth (how he keeps sneaking them in there she has no idea – she blames blue eyes and dimples and the very long, convoluted joke Rob has been trying to tell her for the last five minutes), when Landon comes barreling over in tears.

Someone has said something unkind, something entirely uncalled for. Even worse, it had been an adult. A parent of one of those perpetual children who litter the playground. Her blood boils, her chest burns, and Rob is on his feet, striding across sand and grass and giving that woman the what-for.

Regina watches as he defends his son against harsh words, and her eyes prick with tears.

What would that have been like, she wonders? A father who would protect at a moment's notice, even against something as benign as words? (Words are not benign, she remembers words far more than bruises, words that hurt more than the blister of a hot ember in her palm, the tingling ache of the magic that had healed it.)

When he comes back, he scoops Landon up into his lap, hugs him fiercely but does not apologize. Daddy had always chased bruises and harsh words with apologies, but Rob does not. There's nothing to apologize  _for_. He tells Landon not to believe a word, that none of it is true, but it's not lip service. It's truth.

In five years, she will look back on that moment and think that is when she fell in love with him.

**.::.**

She likes him.

He's less insufferable now that they're what she might dare to call friends—but only marginally so. He still challenges her, still sends her ridiculous budget proposals (if anything, those have gotten worse), and still vehemently opposes her in meetings if they come down on opposite sides of an issue.

He's strong.

She likes him.

He's persistent—but not pushy.

She likes him.

He slides into the empty bench across the booth from her and Henry at Granny's without so much as a hint of an invitation; Landon climbs in after him and greets her with a big grin.

She likes him, a little  _too_  much.

She's no good for him; she should leave him alone.

There is no happiness in this place, she built it to be that way. She's only going to get them both hurt if she doesn't stop this.

She doesn't stop it.

**.::.**

There are limits to what she will allow herself.

Lunches at Granny's are allowed, so are visits to the park, and fortuitous detours for four cones of ice cream. Business lunches in her office, filled with paperwork and bickering, and the fleeting brush of his knee against hers are also allowed, although more and more they lead to moments of eye contact that linger too long before she has to break them.

She could drown in all the blue; they'd both end up with water in their lungs.

Maybe she should allow fewer lunches.

Dinners alone are strictly forbidden, although he does ask once, twice, three times in the same summer. Her polite refusals are met with soft, dimpled smiles, and a resigned nod of his head.

He never pushes, never tries to turn her 'no's into 'yes'es and the novelty of that, of choice, of patience, of  _agency_  is exhilarating.

The faint sting of rejection he never quite manages to hide entirely is less so, and it sticks in her mind.

One day in late August, the memory of all that wounded blue is just too much for her guilty heart to bear (her lonely heart to bear). She texts him:  _Sword in the Stone and Casablanca double header to be shown at the Mayor's Mansion tonight. Two seats still available_.

He replies in minutes:  _Please reserve for Locksley, party of two._

**.::.**

She's never known strong men to be gentle.

Weak men, like her father, they are gentle and kind. They supplicate, and they cower, and they have limp handshakes and clammy palms.

But strong men, in Regina's experience, are not creatures who bend toward tenderness.

Rob is not weak, not in spirit (he's proven that over the last twenty years of verbal sparring with her) nor in body (she visits him at home one day, the tires of her Mercedes crunching gravel on his driveway before she steps out of her car to the sight of him splitting logs in the front yard, shirtless and sweat-slicked, muscles flexing and tensing, and her mouth goes dry as her panties go wet).

He is not weak, but he is gentle. Strong, and sturdy, and with callused hands that cup her jaw like a baby bird as he tips it up to press his lips against hers while "I Wan'na Be Like You" bounces merrily in from the living room. He tastes like salted popcorn and second chances, and her heart beats so hard she thinks it will crack.

She kisses him back, hesitant now in a way she hasn't been in years, but this  _means_  something, this kiss. She has waited decades for this moment, had denied herself once, and then for twenty years straight.

But she doesn't deny herself this time. She kisses back, just as softly. His fingers shift from jaw to nape, nails scraping gently at her scalp until she shivers, and Regina feels the fizzle-snap-bang of it on her tongue, in her chest, along her limbs, down into her toes. She thinks inexplicably of PopRocks, of hardened, crystallized places under her skin, in her bones, coming alive at the touch of his tongue against hers.

She wonders if this is what a soulmate feels like.

And then she panics.

Pulls away, and presses her fingertips to her lips, and stares wide-eyed and dumb at this man who was supposed to be hers, and is again.

"Should I be sorry?" he asks, the corner of his mouth curving up in one of those smiles she so adores.

He should be, she is poison, there are no happy endings in this place, she will only bring him pain.

So she clears her throat, and says, "Yes," and he looks at her with a frown that knows she's lying.

**.::.**

She does not notice until the next day, as she walks to work surly and hunched, gets a morning greeting from the Cricket yet again, and the clocktower just overhead echoes a bonging, resonant clang.

It is eight o'clock in the morning precisely, and old metal hands that haven't moved in twenty-one years are sitting now at exactly eight and twelve instead of just-past-eight and bang-on-three.

Something is  _different,_ something has  _changed_ , time is… time…

She lets out her held breath, quickens her steps in the direction of the Town Hall and wonders what could possibly have caused such a seismic shift in the fabric of her curse.

And then she realizes: PopRocks, and the taste of salt, gentle hands and fault lines in her heart.

Her carefully built world will be torn down by gentle hands, and what of her heart, then? What of his?

She likes him, oh, how she likes him.

But this has to end.

**.::.**

She takes Graham to bed again.

Graham is simple, he is uncomplicated, the guilt of taking him inside her is far easier to live with than the idea that she might find happiness here in this place where all are doomed to lose it.

His kisses are rough and hot, and catch as much flame as damp kindling might. She's tasted far better now, and she can't pretend anymore.

Rob sees them together (she makes sure he sees), leaving Granny's unkempt in the middle of the day just as he arrives with their sons. Henry has one true friend in this world, and that friend is Landon Locksley. She won't deny him playdates with the boy, although she no longer sits hip-to-hip with his father on park benches.

Rob looks her up and down, ignores Graham completely. His jaw clenches. His fist clenches when she bends to smile at Landon's greeting like nothing is amiss, and Regina wonders if his gentleness was all an act after all.

It wasn't.

When she meets his eyes they're stormy, the bruised rejection from before like thunderclouds in their depths, and it cuts down deep into her guts, leaves them bleeding. She presses a hand to her belly to staunch the flow nobody else can see, and ushers Henry toward her car.

**.::.**

Graham is strong, but not gentle.

He does not touch her like a precious thing. He fills a need, but bores a hole at the same time.

A month goes by, and she feels hollowed out in the middle. Her heart aches. Her mind wanders.

The clock ticks on, on, on, but nothing really changes.

Would it be so bad to finally grow old, she wonders?

She calls him to her office to talk over his latest departmental request in person, and Rob stands there before her clothed in worn denim, and soft cotton, and resentment.

Regina swallows her spit and swallows her pride and confesses, "I have scars. I'm not sure I can be what you need."

The hard line of his mouth bends at the edges, dips down into a frown, but those stormclouds clear and leave blue eyes understanding again as he says, "We all have scars, Regina. Let me be the judge of that."

She tells Graham that it's over. She tells Rob she still needs some time.

On Sunday, she eats apple pancakes at a full booth, and feels a little less hollow.

**.::.**

Henry breaks his arm when he is four.

He's climbing trees with Landon Locksley, who is also four, still, always. Rob comments sometimes on their boys growing up together, on how he remembers when Henry was just a wee little thing, on how having sons two years apart is perhaps the perfect age because Landon takes to being the older, wiser one like a duck to water, on how fortuitous it is that their sons were born the same year. She watches the curse spin and weave and remake his mind, and she feels guilty.

Landon Locksley should be twenty-five.

They are climbing trees too tall for little boys of four and twenty-five, and Henry slips and he falls, and Rob is not quick enough to catch him.

She beats them to the hospital (he calls her from his cell phone when they are on their way, but they've been camping all the way out by the gorge, and her office is closer, so much closer, to Storybrooke General).

Henry's perfect little face is tear-stained and dirt-smudged, he smells like damp leaves and tall pines and woodsmoke. He smells like the forest, like  _Rob_ , and it makes Regina's middle twist and ache and burn.

He is  _her_  son, hers, hers alone no matter how much he likes deep-dimpled heads of Parks who let him climb trees unsupervised. And she ought to have known better than to let him go, she ought to have known better than to let him out of her sight for even a moment, because she loves her son deeply, and the things she loves get broken and torn away and crushed to dust.

She yells at Rob with a fury of a mother scared, whips at him with poison words like barbed lashes, and leaves him standing in the hospital parking lot, slack-jawed and rooted to the blacktop as surely as if she'd used magic to bind him there.

When he doesn't follow her inside, she worries that maybe somehow she has managed to actually do just that. That maybe her desperate anxiety had been enough to rip some shred of magic from her core and use it to melt the soles of those sensible hiking boots to the asphalt.

But she leaves a while later, a sleeping Henry against her shoulder, a kelly-green cast around his wrist, and Rob Locksley is nowhere to be found.

He sends flowers to her office the next day. Snowy white roses with a note that simply reads:  _I'm sorry_.

**.::.**

She had never liked him. He was too persistent. Too pushy. Too unwilling to ever take no for an answer about any little issue he felt strongly about.

But she likes him now, too much, always too much, and he feels strongly about her.

He doesn't push her this time. Gives her space she wishes he wouldn't.

She calls him after a week, and says, "I'm sorry, too. I know it wasn't your fault."

There's a curved-lip lilt to his voice as he tells her, "You're quite the Mama Bear sometimes, do you know that?" She does. "But he's safe with me, always. I hope you know that."

"I do," she tells him.

She just wishes that  _she_  was safe, too.

**.::.**

He doesn't read.

She has a library full of books, and has read every one. Mystery, biography, historical fiction. World events, and science, and philosophy. She speaks six languages from  _this_  world, in addition to the four from home (sometimes she can't imagine what she ever did with her time before Henry, and then Rob picks up her copy of  _Bonjour Tristesse_  and asks teasingly if she keeps it around just for show, and she remembers – she taught herself French).

He doesn't read, but he is intelligent.

He can name every bird and butterfly, every tree and flower. He sits on her back porch one night and points to the stars, naming them each in turn for her, tracing their constellations.

Polaris, and Vega. Arcturus, and Spica. Leo, and Cepheus, and Cassiopeia.

She tells him all the legends behind them; the curse helped him navigate, but never gave him the history.

He points to Hercules, and calls it the Blue Knight, and her heart leaps into her throat and sticks there. The Blue Knight loomed over the midnight summer skies in the Enchanted Forest, guarded the kingdom of the heavens from the greed of wicked men.

He shouldn't remember that.

She can hear her own pulse as he moves on to Draco, like nothing is amiss, and it doesn't fade until he's mapped the whole sky.

**.::.**

In November, Landon Locksley turns five.

Regina stands at the perimeter of Granny's Diner and stares and stares at the streamers strung around the front corner, at the dangling, curly paper twists that end in bold, primary-colored 5s, at the five candles on his cake, and the five chubby preschooler fingers he holds up when Granny grinningly asks him how old he is today.

Every year since Storybrooke rolled in like a storm, Landon Locksley has turned four.

Her heart pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds, and the cake Regina chokes down tastes like ashes.

She leaves before the end of the party, insists she has a migraine brewing when Rob asks if she's feeling alright, when he says she doesn't look herself.

He offers to take Henry for a sleepover so she can get a good night's rest, and Regina nods dumbly, then beats a hasty retreat.

At home she runs herself a bath, so hot it scalds, and sinks chin-deep into it.

It's going to be okay. It will be okay. It's just time, it's only time.

The curse still holds, even if time moves.

It's only time.

**.::.**

The next time he kisses her, it is under mistletoe at Christmas.

He tastes like peppermint, cool and sharp, his lips just a little sticky from the candy cane gripped in his left hand.

His right still cups her jaw like a tender thing.

It is brief, chaste. For the boys, as they giggle and point to the sprig hung from the doorway, breaks before they can  _ewwww_  over adults being gross.

But his thumb traces the apple of her cheek lightly, and he sighs a sweet breath against her as they part.

She sips mulled wine to chase the taste of him from her lips, and tells herself it's the wine and not the kiss that makes her belly warm all evening.

**.::.**

There's a New Year's Eve party at the Rabbit Hole every December 31st, and this year is no different.

Well, except this: unlike every other year on record, this year the mayor is actually in attendance.

Rob had insisted, had caught her in a moment of weakness and spun some pitiful yarn about being dateless as the year changed over, and how oh-so-terrible that would be for him.

"Not my problem," she had shrugged coolly, and yet, somehow, it had become so.

Somehow, she has found herself in a festive dress, and fashionably high heels, her son and Rob's safely stowed with a sitter. No doubt chugging sparkling grape juice while she hovers near the edge of a pool table with a glass of champagne and glares at anyone who tries to speak to her.

Her head of Parks is very good at pool.

She sips, and she watches, appreciates the way he bends himself across the table for a particularly delicate shot, the sleeves of his white button-down rolled up to his elbows, the grey pinstripe slacks hugging his rear end in a way that simply shouldn't be allowed.

He cleans up well.

She watches with interest until the very moment he turns to look at her, smug from having sunk two balls into two different pockets on a single shot. Regina rolls her eyes and feigns boredom, and attempts to hide her smirk in her champagne flute.

Their lips touch again at midnight, and it is not the chaste peck of Christmas. He is whiskey, and fizzy champagne, and tipsy, giddy revelry. Regina drinks deep, presses close, pours a reckless amount of promise and desire into the kiss.

Tomorrow, she'll blame the champagne.

When she breathes, "Take me home," he groans and nips gently at her lower lip, and complies.

**.::.**

Regina has been used. Regina has been fucked. Regina has been taken to bed at her own whims, and at the whims of others.

But it's never been quite like this.

He is no longer gentle, but he is not harsh either. He's confident, passionate.

A  _lover_ , in a way she hasn't ever known a man to be.

He grasps and cups and squeezes, he kisses and he sucks and he nips just enough to make her hiss and ache delightfully, but not enough to bruise or wound.

She is slick and slippery, and hot and breathless, putty in his hands but oh-so- _alive_  at the same time.

She wants him.  _Wants_  him.

And why shouldn't she? He's for her, after all. He's meant to be hers.

And surely in the morning, once her head stops fizzing like champagne, once her limbs are not so loose, once her brain is not so preoccupied with 8-ball-corner-pocket, and that vein that runs along his forearm, and the way his ass looks in those slacks… she'll remember why she hasn't done this for twenty-three years, and perhaps why she didn't do it for all the years before.

But tonight, all she knows is that he cradles her hips in his palms and bends his head to trace the names of constellations against her with his tongue. Orion, and The Blue Knight, and Cassiopeia. His hair soft between her fingertips as she clutches and gasps and cries out for him.

When she takes him inside her, it's with eyes open, lips parted, and a feeling of perilous rightness that she doesn't dare think too hard on. She'll hold it tonight in her palms like the delicate, fragile thing it is, and hope that when the sun comes up she doesn't clench a fearful fist around it until it cracks.


End file.
